[cancelled] CSH Workshop: “Communicating complex climate issues with deliberative democracy”

This workshop is organized by Karoline Wiesner, University of Bristol & CSH External Faculty and David Garcia, CSH Faculty.

Abstract

It might be argued that democracies are ill equipped to tackle climate change given decision processes are lengthy and subject to partisan considerations. For example, it has been shown that electoral outcomes are dependent on identification with a party rather than issue-focused. As a result, while in smaller deliberative fora a more radical response to climate change is often favoured by a majority, the political line of the countries does not reflect the issue-specific preference of individuals. Insights from complexity science should help understand the phenomenon which involves feedback loops within processes that are not coupled but should be in order for a new stable state to be reached – a more climate-friendly policy. This workshop will explore how the available tools, ranging from data analysis of online social media activity and agent-based models to information theoretic statistical mechanical tools for detecting state transitions, can inform a deliberative process for communicating options for tackling the current climate emergency. The workshop will bring together practitioners of the social sciences, of climate science and of complexity science to discuss possible experiments for identifying / designing deliberation tools for climate communication that are informed by complexity science. All participants are confirmed.

The workshop is centred around the following three questions:

1. Which issues relevant for the current climate crisis are suitable for deliberative or discursive democracy involving lay citizens?

2. Which tools from complexity science and computational social science are suitable to monitor or guide issue-focused opinion formation in a deliberative-democracy setting?

3. How can majority opinions on climate issues in a population be translated into democratic majority decisions, across party lines?